Spies, Generals, and the World Beyond Oil

Last Friday, in Santa Monica, California, I participated in a conference entitled, “The Next World: How Should the United States Respond to Rising Powers?” The meeting was sponsored by the Stanley Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the New America Foundation; it took place in a beachside hotel, a fact that seemed frustratingly irrelevant as the day wore on, since we convened in a windowless basement-level room brazenly called the Grand Salon. Even without a view, however, we could tell where we were; during breaks, we chatted with Tom Hayden about which Hollywood film project he believed might finally capture the nuances of 1968—a refreshing change from Washington’s requisite chatter about Sarah Palin, moose, and polar bears.

The substantive conversations at the conference turned on two premises. The first was the now-familiar idea that the next President will inherit a multi-polar (or “non-polar,” or “post-American”) world in which the United States will have to manage a position of diminished influence while coping with rising or revitalizing nations such as China, Russia, India, and Brazil—not to mention the old but evolving challenge of Europe. The second premise, perhaps less well-marketed in Times bestsellers (a gap that Thomas Friedman is apparently about to fill), is that the very definition of American “national security” is changing—or should change—to account for problems such as climate change, the need for a government-stimulated transition away from fossil fuels, the challenges of global disease epidemics, and the need to construct a national education system that might allow the United States to maintain its relative standards of living during a sustained period of economic competition with China and India.

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, went so far as to describe a “revolution” that he believed was taking place within the U.S.-military and national-security bureaucracies. Military officers and intelligence officers, even more than elected politicians, Katulis said, are thinking in untraditional ways about the character of global security challenges, to include threats other than rival militaries or hostile terrorist groups; as an example, he cited a National Intelligence Assessment (N.I.A.) completed in July by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which described climate change as not merely an environmental problem, but as a national-security threat.

An N.I.A. is not the same thing as a National Intelligence Estimate, or N.I.E., in part because it does not rely on classified intelligence—it is an assessment of information available from open sources. The project emerged from a 2006 review within the intelligence community about new subjects that required analytical attention. The full N.I.A. is worth reading, but here are its key findings:

“Although the United States will be less affected and is better equipped than most nations to deal with climate change, and may even see a benefit owing to increases in agriculture productivity, infrastructure repair and replacement will be costly. We judge that the most significant impact for the United States will be indirect and result from climate-driven effects on many other countries and their potential to seriously affect US national security interests. We assess that climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems—such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions. Climate change could threaten domestic stability in some states, potentially contributing to intra- or, less likely, interstate conflict, particularly over access to increasingly scarce water resources. We judge that economic migrants will perceive additional reasons to migrate because of harsh climates, both within nations and from disadvantaged to richer countries.”

It is easy to imagine the reaction of nativist and evangelical thinkers to this forecast: build a wall around our borders, build an ark behind the wall, and while awaiting the End of Days, take advantage of our “increases in agricultural productivity” to sell more corn to the desperate and displaced overseas. Conventional political opinion, however, is moving in another policy direction, if fitfully.

A formal threat assessment like this N.I.A. can have a practical effect in Washington by helping to reinforce the political conditions required for Congress to fund new national investments. Earlier this decade, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency began to write analyses about the global-security implications of AIDS; this work eventually helped to bolster President Bush’s large investments in prevention and anti-retroviral drug distribution in Africa—investments which many in the Republican Party had previously opposed, during the Clinton Administration. (There were other factors in the Republican Party’s turnabout on Africa, of course—particularly the increasing concern about African poverty and human suffering among evangelical Christian groups.) It would be encouraging to think that something similar is now being seeded within the Pentagon and at the Directorate of National Intelligence on climate-change policy.

The military’s internal thinking and decision-making about the pace and character of any transition away from fossil fuels will be particularly important. The global transition from coal to oil as a transportation fuel accelerated during the early twentieth century when Winston Churchill, while serving as first Lord of the Admiralty in the British Navy, ordered British ships to switch from coal-generated steam to oil. Just a few weeks ago, in what one can only hope is the start of an analogous episode, the U.S. Army Secretary convened a conference on energy issues; a general who attended told me that the discussion touched upon, among other subjects, fuel efficiency in Army vehicles, and on the challenges of next-generation battery technology. The Pentagon’s motivation in considering these problems has little to do with concerns about the global environment; rather, the military must assess how to keep its forces mobile and fully fueled in a prospective world where expeditionary and pre-positioned fuel depots may be more difficult and expensive to provision than in the past.

During the 1980s and 1990s, when the Pentagon sought to dominate the use of information technology on the battlefield, its research and investments helped to spawn the Internet and the digital information revolution; along the way, this transformation helped to create an astonishing spurt of productivity growth and wealth creation inside the United States. (The Pentagon’s similar investments in missile defense, unfortunately, have been much more wasteful.) The next President’s civilian leadership at the Defense Department will have an opportunity to force the military to speed up and deepen its work on alternative transportation fuels, battery capacity, energy efficiency, and other defense-relevant innovations; this work is essential purely as military policy, but it could also have a Churchillian effect on the effort to combat climate change, as well as on the next energy economy.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad. He is the author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.”